We played this for the first time the other night. I like the quick character creation and swift combat rules. We picked up the system very quickly. The inclusion of poker chips and playing cards as aids was fun and it was nice as GM to give out "benny" awards rather than having to give XP.

Why not five stars?

The character progress is much steadier than than D&D or GURPS, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but will probably upset power gamers. The high level combat also gets a bit broken. With raises being given out for every 4 points beyond the target number dice rolls with large variance are going to cause wildly different effects. I'd like to see the threshold for raises scale in relation to toughness so a high level creature/npc/vehicle/pc would have to have maybe 6 or more to get a raise to wound them. I'll try it out a bit more but I think that will undoubtedly become a house rule. A simple table of toughness to raise threshold fixes that without complicating the rules.

The book itself is laid out well and includes a beastiary without needing to buy a supplement. Yay! It would have been nice to have some more npc stats too, such as a mixture of guards, common people (or whatever) as standard but I suppose those will be in the supplements. It doesn't take long to knock them up but GMs are lazy. There are sample wild card characters in there to start play quickly which means you could be starting a game from scratch in minutes.

The vehicle/items list as more than sufficient for instant play but I would have liked to have seen some rules for flying/space combat. It felt like those were missing especially in my Sci-fi campaign.

Overall a very flexible and fun system. I emphasize the "fun" aspect. Having been playing GURPS for two years it's very nice to get away from the simulation style game to something more swashbuckly. I noticed my players were just having fun rather than adding up stats and modifiers even in the first session. I'd happily recommend it to any level of gamer and expect to get a lot of use out of it. If Pinnacle just did one of two of the tweaks I mentioned I'd happily have given this five stars.